Atlantis Black Market Drugs Commercial: Sting Operation or Bold Move?

A new Internet black market for online drug buying has published a frank video commercial to Youtube. Some think it’s a sting operation for law enforcement.

There are several “black markets” on the Internet, where visitors can shop anonymously and make purchases using virtually untrackable currencies like BitCoin and offshore money exchanges. The most well known marketplace is Silk Road, which is a little over two years old. These marketplaces are made possible by the technology of “onion skin routing“, made accessible via TOR nodes, which randomize communications in ways that make web site accesses very difficult to trace back to the endpoints (buyers and sellers). Any web user can dive into the underworld by adding a few components to the standard web browsers, with just a little technical wizardly.

As might have been expected, these Internet black markets are home to vendors of illegal substances including prescription drugs, street drugs like marijuana and synthetic cannabinoids. In other words, just about any chemical for which there is black market demand. Those who watch the underworld have predicted that the rising Internet black market for illegal drug sales will top $25 million this year, after steadily rising for the past 2 years.

A third marketplace launched this past spring, and has seen steady growth. Called Atlantis, it is now remarkable because it just published an unabashedly in-your-face advertisement on YouTube, promoting itself as the place where a guy can go buy weed online and solve all of his problems.

I doubt this will stay on YouTube for long, so watch it while you have a chance. The various players in the web drug underworld are saying this may be a law enforcement sting operation. The video clip is almost absurdly up-front about the illegal nature of the drug black markets, “as if it were perfectly legal”.

Aside from its video ad, a Twitter account calling itself AtlantisMarket spent Wednesday aggressively tweeting at bloggers and Bitcoin advocates that Atlantis is “the new better and cheaper alternative to silk road.” In another tweet, it claimed that it would be launching a “big social media campaign,” and has posted on Reddit seeking a marketing employee.

In an interview with Reddit members, the CEO described how he started up advertising and promotion for the new marketplace by targeting those who use the online currencies and encryption systems for anonymous buying:

We posted an announcement in two crypto-currency community forums and the news spread quite quickly. We also offered incentives for vendors at other market places to sign up and take advantage of trading with no commission fees.

Comments

Sounds like a hell of a viral link building idea even if the thing isn’t legit 🙂 Post a simple WP site and create a video like this, buy a little Fiverr promotion, do a few press releases and see how many bloggers and journalists pick it up.

Trackbacks

[…] browsers could not find nor visit Silk Road, unless specialized encryption had been configured. Like Atlantis black market, Silk Road was known as a place to buy drugs and other controlled materials without oversight, […]